Hand-Painted Glass Discs — 30 cm (2025)
Each disc is a hand-painted, one-off work created on 30 cm circular glass. These pieces extend the Daubist philosophy into a new medium—layering gesture, humour, and cultural resonance onto a cool, luminous surface.
Working on glass allows the motifs to hover, almost weightless, with colour gliding across the glossy plane. Some discs feature singular, iconic figures; others unfold into complex narrative scenes populated by spirits, animals, and ancestral presences.
Every work is painted by hand, signed, and completely unique.
Price: $700 AUD each
Another Bakaneko (2025)
A playful interpretation of the Japanese bakeneko—the shapeshifting supernatural cat—reduced to a bold aqua silhouette outlined in black. The curl of the tail, the alert mask-like face, and the surreal human-like mouth all point to the ambiguity at the heart of the creature: familiar yet uncanny, domestic yet otherworldly.
On glass, the figure becomes even more spectral, floating against the pale circular ground like an apparition caught mid-transformation. A whimsical work charged with mythic mischief.
Louie da Fly (2024)
A cheeky homage to the long-running Australian cultural icon, Louie the Fly—reimagined through the Daubist lens. Painted onto a vivid aqua glass disc, the figure stands proudly with a ragged fishbone trophy, equal parts punk, pest, and folk hero.
Rendered in thick black linework with jittery motion marks buzzing around him, Louie becomes a kind of suburban trickster spirit—part childhood memory, part pop mythology, part street-corner delinquent. His oversized eyes and crooked grin give him the swagger of a character who refuses to be erased from the national psyche.
On glass, the work takes on an extra charge: luminous, clean, and playful, yet still carrying that irreverent, slightly feral Driller energy. Louie da Fly is both a nostalgic nod and a contemporary character study—an Australian anti-hero immortalised in a perfect 30 cm circle.
Cézanne’s Bathers and Me (2025)
On this 30 cm painted glass disc, Driller restages one of art history’s most enduring motifs—Cézanne’s bathers—pulling them out of the 19th century and dropping them, unapologetically, into his own visual universe.
The familiar figures lounge, gesture, and wade in water, but the scene is re-drawn in Driller’s unmistakable line: bold, elastic, irreverent. The colours are bright and immediate; the composition loose, playful, and alive with painterly energy. A contemporary onlooker, half-submerged in the foreground, places Driller himself inside the lineage—an artist stepping directly into the conversation with the modern masters.
This work is both homage and intervention. It acknowledges the weight of Cézanne’s legacy while refusing to treat it as sacred. Instead, Driller reclaims the image as open terrain: a place where art history and personal mythology can mingle, skinny-dip, and splash around together.
GIRL WITH DOVE (2024)
Hand-painted 30 cm glass disc
Referencing Pablo Picasso’s 1901 masterpiece Girl with a Dove, Driller reinterprets the Blue Period icon through the luminous, floating medium of painted glass. The original’s melancholic palette and tender symbolism are distilled into a simplified, almost devotional outline — a Daubist re-drawing that removes sentimentality and emphasises structure, contour, and presence.
On glass, the figure becomes a kind of apparition: weightless, suspended between sky and earth, freed from the heaviness of Picasso’s blue shadows. Driller’s version reframes the image as a universal emblem of care and fragility, while simultaneously asserting the artist’s long-running practice of cultural and art-historical appropriation — a respectful but irreverent gesture that pulls canonical Modernism into a contemporary, playful register.
This work is part of Driller’s ongoing series of painted glass discs, where iconic motifs, pop forms, and art-historical quotations are re-imagined within a circular field — a format that feels both domestic and ceremonial, like a devotional plate for the post-modern era.
THE BALLERINAS (2025)
Hand-painted 30 cm glass disc — referencing Edgar Degas
In The Ballerinas, Driller turns his attention to the shadow side of Impressionism — specifically the world behind Edgar Degas’ ballet scenes, where “patronage” by wealthy male subscribers often blurred into exploitation.
Rendered on glass, the scene becomes a theatrical arena:
a blood-red backdrop, pale dancers, and a ring of dark-suited men who loom like judges, owners, or ringmasters. The women hover between grace and fatigue; their bodies are light, almost translucent, while the men remain heavy, opaque, and immovable.
Driller’s characteristic flattening and cartoon-like linework exposes what Degas kept just outside the frame — the transactional gaze, the hierarchy, the uncomfortable proximity of art, labour, and male power. On the circular glass surface, the ballet becomes a petri dish of class and gender dynamics, held up for scrutiny.
At once playful and damning, The Ballerinas reframes a revered corner of art history by pulling its social realities into the open — a perfectly Daubist gesture of revealing what culture prefers to prettify or forget.
Ray Gun (2024)
Hand-painted on glass
Ray Gun is Driller Jet Armstrong’s explosive homage to Australia’s debut in Olympic breaking. Painted on glowing neon glass, the iconic Daubist figure morphs into a b-boy—arms frozen mid-power-move, body coiled with comic-book energy—its radiating halo doubling as both ancient motif and street-culture insignia.
A playful nod to the nickname of Australia’s champion breaker, this work folds together Indigenous-inspired iconography, pop aesthetics, and sports mythology in the unmistakable Armstrong style. The luminous surface gives the character a floating, holographic presence—part artefact, part logo, part mascot for a new cultural moment.
This piece marks an evolution in the Daubist language:
the figure becomes kinetic, contemporary, and unmistakably Australian.
Cockhead (2024)
Hand-painted on glass,
Artwork Text:
Cockhead (2024) continues Driller Jet Armstrong’s long-running fascination with hybrid beings—those strange, irreverent, slightly feral creatures that sit somewhere between totem, mascot, joke, and warning. Painted on radiant glass, this two-legged rooster-human chimera is both ridiculous and uncanny: a barnyard deity walking upright, strutting between species and identities with total indifference to category.
As with Armstrong’s broader Daubist logic, the hybrid is never merely comic. It critiques conformity, masculinity, nationalism, and the absurdities of Australian cultural archetypes—here compressed into a single, proudly idiotic figure. The directness of the linework, the cartoon clarity, and the glowing green backdrop all heighten the work’s totemic energy, turning the creature into something both dumb and divine.
The deliberately mischievous signature—“driller bum”—leans into the work’s refusal of seriousness, while still revealing a sharp conceptual edge. Hybridity becomes a site of freedom: from genre, from expectation, from the rigid categories that define “proper” art.
Playful. Subversive. Totally ungovernable.
The Red Nude (2025)
The Red Nude (2025) is Driller Jet Armstrong in full, liberated play-mode: a mischievous reimagining of the modernist studio scene, painted onto glass with a palette that vibrates between Matisse, Hockney, and cartoon dream logic.
A crimson reclining figure lounges with unbothered confidence, haloed by a pastel-striped interior and overseen by a tiny blue guardian-dog — part witness, part familiar spirit. The window-within-a-window opens onto an impossible landscape, where a bottle, a fruit, and drifting clouds become props in a theatre of domestic surrealism.
Drawn with Armstrong’s unmistakably bold line and colour joy, the work takes the “classic nude” and flips it into something humorous, intimate, and strangely tender. It feels like the moment after a bath, the moment before a thought, or the moment when the viewer realises they’re being watched back.
Hand-painted on glass, this piece belongs to Armstrong’s growing body of circular works that merge pop, modernism, and Daubist irreverence.
Medium: Pigment on glass
Year: 2025
Signature: Driller Jet Armstrong
Series: Contemporary Glass Works / Playful Modernism
On Country (2024)
Gel transfer on original landscape painting
On Country marks one of the most incisive moments in the evolution of Daubism’s ongoing confrontation with the colonial landscape tradition. Using gel-transfer techniques, Driller Jet Armstrong overlays three Aboriginal hunters across an inherited pastoral scene, not as ghosts or “insertions,” but as rightful presences returning to a country from which they were historically painted out.
The original settler canvas — polite, picturesque, obedient — becomes the stage on which a deeper law reasserts itself. Armstrong’s transferred figures are semi-translucent, as if surfacing through the thin skin of the colonial imaginary, refusing erasure. Their bodies, weapons, and movement cut diagonally across the scene, rupturing the static idyll and restoring narrative, agency and time.
A dotted border — recalling both ceremonial marking and 20th-century tourist-art frameworks — becomes a deliberate tension point: a reminder that representation is never neutral, and that the colonial frame itself is always part of the story.
Through this work, Armstrong is not “adding figures” but reinstating sovereign presence. On Country becomes a meditation on return, resilience and correction — an image where the land, and those who belong to it, reclaim the pictorial field together.
P.O.A.
Hans Heysen Daub (2024)
Gel transfer on original landscape painting
P.O.A.
Hans Heysen Daub (2024) is a deliberate collision of two Australian landscapes—one revered, one forgotten—superimposed through the signature Daubist method of gel-transfer “theft.” By lifting iconic eucalypts from Hans Heysen’s canon and laying them, ghostlike, over an anonymous vintage landscape painting, Driller Jet Armstrong stages a quiet but unmistakable act of interference.
The spectral Heysen gums do not replace the original scene; they hover, intrude, seep, and stain their way through it. Their transparency becomes the point: a reminder that every landscape in Australia already contains another beneath it—erased, overwritten, romanticised, or simply ignored.
This work continues Armstrong’s long-running exploration of appropriation as archaeology, where “stealing” becomes a method of revealing what was always there. The transferred trees shimmer like memory, or afterimage, or truth long submerged. The result is a double-vision of Australian art history: pastoral nostalgia pressed against cultural critique, the decorative pushed into dialogue with the monumental.
Hans Heysen Daub is a meditation on authorship, authenticity, and the uncanny persistence of the iconic. It is both homage and interruption. Both reverence and rebellion. Entirely Daubist.
Atticus Atlas Butterfly Wings Daub (1996) P.O.A.
Mixed media on original landscape painting
Collection of the Artist
In this early experimental work, Driller Jet Armstrong revives a discarded landscape by grafting new life onto its most desolate element: a dead, leafless tree standing skeletal against an arid horizon. The original painting offers no hope of renewal — its central trunk is barren, its branches stripped, a symbol of exhaustion in both nature and the genre of pastoral art itself.
Armstrong’s intervention transforms that despair.
Four Attacus Atlas butterfly wings — vast, ornate, and resembling botanical forms in their own right — are placed gently upon the branches like impossible blossoms. In this act, the tree is given foliage again, not through nature but through imagination. The wings become leaves, flowers, fruit, or spiritual emissaries, reanimating what was once inert.
The gesture operates as a metaphor for Armstrong’s broader practice:
a dead image made fertile, a static landscape summoned into movement, an abandoned artwork given new breath.
Where the original painter recorded the land, Armstrong resuscitates it. The butterfly wings become symbols of metamorphosis — announcing that even the most exhausted images can transform, unfurl, and take flight under an artist willing to see possibility where none appears.
This 1996 work prefigures the core principles of Daubism: reclamation, renewal, and the radical insistence that every painting — no matter how forgotten — can grow again.
Call of the Bush (2022)
Acrylic intervention on original landscape painting
In Call of the Bush, Driller Jet Armstrong turns a quiet, sentimental bush vista into a sharply political—and darkly humorous—environmental warning. The luminous word “MEEOW” slices through the landscape like a siren, its bright interior revealing fragments of the original horizon while the surrounding darkness closes in.
At the centre sits a stark, leafless tree—an emblem of environmental strain—its branches entangled with the typography as though nature itself is trying to reclaim the intruding word.
The work speaks directly to the ecological devastation caused by feral cats in Australia, whose predation threatens countless native species. Here, the cat does not appear, yet its presence is overwhelming—announced not by the animal but by its call echoing across the bush.
Armstrong transforms kitsch landscape nostalgia into a site of activism: the cute becomes corrosive, the decorative becomes urgent, and a single sound—“MEEOW”—becomes a warning bell for the land itself.
A witty, unsettling, and quietly furious Daubist commentary on Australia’s fragile ecosystems.
Boy on a Bench with a Ball (2009)
Felt additions on found Australian landscape painting
In Boy on a Bench with a Ball, Driller Jet Armstrong inserts a disarmingly cheerful felt figure into a soft, pastoral bush scene — a collision so abrupt it becomes instantly funny, uncanny, and quietly subversive.
The naïve cut-out boy, perched with his basketball and white boots, feels like he has wandered out of a 1970s craft book and accidentally landed in a classical landscape tradition built to exclude him. His flat, child-friendly simplicity undermines the seriousness of the painted bush, puncturing the illusion of depth and nostalgia that these second-hand landscape paintings so often try to perform.
The result is both charming and mischievous: a playful intervention that exposes how constructed these “Australian idylls” always were. By inserting a felt character who doesn’t belong, Driller reveals the mechanics of belonging itself — who is permitted to appear in the landscape, who is absent, and what stories these pictures were originally designed to tell.
At the same time, the work is simply delightful: a tiny felt boy, owning his bench, his ball, and his place in the Australian mythos, whether invited there or not. It is Daubism at its most cheeky and most precise — a single, humorous addition that rewrites the entire painting beneath it.
Gilbert and George enjoying a spot of Daubism… (2011)
Felt figures from a children’s game and acrylic on original landscape painting
In this playful yet pointed work, Driller Jet Armstrong invites two of Britain’s most iconic provocateurs—Gilbert & George—into the Australian landscape, not as exalted art-world giants but as small, felt cut-outs borrowed from a children’s game. Their reduction to soft toy avatars destabilises the usual hierarchy: the “great men of art” are humbled, miniaturised, and quite literally stuck onto someone else’s painting.
The hand-scrawled text, hovering between homage and mischief, establishes a self-looping reflexivity central to Daubism. The landscape becomes a mere stage set, a background overwritten by commentary, while the commentary itself becomes part of the artwork’s constructed fiction.
Humour softens the edges, but beneath it lies a serious Daubist proposition:
that all images—high art, low art, borrowed, stolen, inherited, or reimagined—exist in a continuous state of re-contextualisation.
Gilbert & George, themselves lifelong appropriators of British urban life, are here absorbed back into the logic of Daubism, their presence turning the work into a meta-conversation about influence, authorship, and the slippery performance of artistic identity.
A gentle, cheeky, and knowingly recursive disruption of the canon.
Spot Painting #1 (2020)
P.O.A.
Acrylic overpaint on original landscape painting
In Spot Painting #1, Armstrong systematically obscures an inherited pastoral landscape beneath a dense veil of hand-painted white dots—an intervention that hovers somewhere between erasure, revelation, and critique. What at first reads as a decorative “spot painting” quickly complicates itself: the original image becomes visible only in flickers, glimpsed through the perforations like a memory being stubbornly overwritten.
While knowingly echoing canonical references—from Lichtenstein’s Benday dots to the co-opted “dot style” popularised in the global imagination of Indigenous Australian art—Armstrong flips the dynamic. Here, the colonial landscape is the one subjected to patterning, fragmentation, and visual interruption. The dots act as both screen and spotlight, drawing attention to the inherited image’s manufactured serenity and its art-historical baggage.
This is Daubism at its most forensic: an insistence that every painting carries a buried history, and that the act of painting over is also an act of looking into. The landscape remains present, but no longer authoritative—relegated to the background as the artist’s gesture asserts a new, critical surface.
A work that oscillates between beauty and disruption, Spot Painting #1 is a quiet but pointed dismantling of the Australian landscape tradition, one dot at a time.
Toxic Algal Bloom (2025)
Paint marker on 30 cm glass disc
In recent months, the dramatic toxic bloom stretching along South Australia’s coast—covering the Fleurieu Peninsula, Kangaroo Island, the Port River/West Lakes region and beyond—has been described as a “bushfire in the ocean”.
Driller Jet Armstrong crystallises that crisis into a 30 cm glass disc, drawing a chaotic ecology of playful figures, marine creatures and skeletal forms. The work becomes a micro-ecosystem under threat: cheerful colours meeting symbols of collapse. Like the real bloom, it spreads across the surface, suffocating the calm beneath.
Here Armstrong transforms the disc into a fragile world of its own, one where innocence (represented by cartoonish figures) meets catastrophe (blanketing forms and ghost-marks). The glass becomes both vessel and warning sign: as the bloom blankets coastlines, so the artist blankets painted surfaces—exposing how rapidly play can turn to crisis, how beauty can hide disaster, and how ecology and culture intertwine.
Toxic Algal Bloom thus stands as a Daubist act of both commemoration and alarm: a reproduction of cultural “dot-blindness” overlaid with urgent environmental imagery. It asks: when the land and sea we imagine as safe begin to fail, what part do our playful illusions have in their collapse?
Raygun and Snoop Dogg at the Olympics (2024)
Paint marker on 30 cm glass disc
In 2024 the world learned two things: breaking is now an Olympic sport, and Snoop Dogg will commentate absolutely anything. In this work, Driller pairs Australia’s viral breaking sensation “Raygun” with an unimpressed, long-limbed Snoop Dogg — capturing the exact cultural whiplash of that moment when earnest athletic ambition collided with global meme culture.
Rendered on a radiant disc of glass, the figures hover between icon and cartoon, standing in for the way the media flattened the Olympic debut of breaking into soundbites, gifs, and internet folklore. Raygun’s upside-down pose echoes the viral footage; Snoop’s folded-arms stance channels the collective eyebrow-raise of the planet.
The result is a playful time capsule of 2024’s strangest cultural duet — an Australian Olympian and a Californian rap legend sharing the same meme-space — brought into the ever-expanding Daubist universe of appropriation, remixing, and visual sampling.
Smoking Ceremony (2025)
Hand-painted 30 cm glass disc
Smoking Ceremony (2025) brings the Raygun universe into a ritual of its own making—an absurd, affectionate, and quietly pointed re-imagining of communal ceremony. Set on a field of soft ochre polka-dots, Driller’s motley gathering of beings—Raygun figures, animals, hybrids, and tricksters—form a loose circle of pipes, puffs, and spiralling smoke.
Here, the “smoking ceremony” is not a literal borrowing of Indigenous ritual, but a knowingly cartoonish exaggeration of the way non-Indigenous Australia often misreads, sanitises, or commodifies sacred cultural practices. Driller’s characters—slightly bewildered, slightly earnest, slightly stoned—perform a ceremony that is clearly theirs, not anyone else’s: a ritual of confusion, community, and shared breath.
The work sits squarely within Armstrong’s 2024–25 glass-disc series, where Raygun’s world expands into a full cast of recurring motifs—animals who smoke, figures who float, and mythic beings who seem to be improvising their way into culture. Humour becomes critique; play becomes a way of looking twice.
Smoking Ceremony (2025) is both innocent and incisive—an image that knows exactly how silly it is, and why the joke matters.
Drinking in the Park (2025)
A 30 cm glass disc capturing three languid figures sharing a bottle under an impossibly bright sky. Driller Jet Armstrong distills the classic art-historical “pastoral gathering” into something at once comic and strangely tender.
A study of bodies, boredom, and the rituals of being human—rendered with Driller’s unmistakable line and acid-green glow.
Portrait d’un riche connard (2025) P.O.A.
Oil over original landscape painting, appropriated from a portrait by John Singer Sargent
In Portrait d’un riche connard, Armstrong lifts and re-renders the elegance of a John Singer Sargent gentleman—an icon of late-19th-century wealth, polish and social power—only to drag him, with characteristic irreverence, into the gritty territory of Daubism. Painted directly over a discarded landscape, the figure becomes a kind of ghost of privilege, haunting a world he no longer owns.
Armstrong’s brush both honours and undermines Sargent’s painterly authority: the refined tuxedo and moustache remain recognisable, but the expression drifts into a spectral blankness, a hollowed-out remnant of class performance. The handwritten title, portrait d’un riche connard (“portrait of a rich asshole”), performs the final rupture—collapsing the distance between high art, social critique, and a distinctly Australian sardonicism.
The result is a work that exposes the fragility of inherited prestige, challenging the historical mythologies that hang so comfortably on gallery walls.
Woman with a Clear Plastic Umbrella (2025) P.O.A.
Oil paint on original Australian landscape painting
In this work, Driller Jet Armstrong lifts a John Singer Sargent figure out of her genteel, high-Edwardian world and drops her — parasol, posture and all — into a humble, dowdy Australian landscape painting. The genteel Sargent woman, now rendered through Armstrong’s loose, ghostly brushwork and encased beneath a strangely contemporary clear plasticumbrella, becomes a spectral intrusion: an anachronistic tourist wandering into a landscape that never asked for her.
Armstrong’s overpainting deliberately refuses to “match” the original scene. Instead the Sargent figure floats like an apparition, half-formed, half-dissolved — a Daubist intervention that exposes the absurdity of importing European elegance into a settler-colonial landscape painting tradition.
The plastic umbrella is the key: a sly temporal glitch that collapses centuries of taste, class and art history into a single uneasy moment. In true Daubist style, Armstrong overturns the authority of both paintings — the cheap landscape and the revered Sargent — allowing the collision itself to generate a new, unsettled work.
A portrait becomes a haunting. A landscape becomes a stage. And the act of appropriation becomes the artwork’s central, destabilising truth.
Four Nudes (2025)
Hand-painted on glass
Driller Jet Armstrong
Four Nudes places a quartet of elongated, stylised female figures against a flat blush-pink field, a colour that deliberately refuses depth so the viewer must confront the figures directly — without atmosphere, without escape.
Part homage, part détournement, the work slyly invokes the lineage of the “group nude” in Western art — from Schiele’s tense clusters to Picasso’s fractured bathers — but renders it in Driller’s unmistakable, hand-drawn line, turning the once-monumental genre into something intimate, immediate, and utterly contemporary.
On glass, the figures hover like decals of desire, longing or solidarity — depending on where the eye rests. Their bodies overlap but never fuse, suspended in a moment where vulnerability meets quiet defiance. The pink field amplifies the emotional temperature: playful, confrontational, tender, strange.
A continuation of Armstrong’s long-running project of reformatting art-historical tropes into personal mythologies, Four Nudes is both a love letter and a critique — a re-envisioning of the female form that is neither objectified nor idealized, but simply present: unguarded, awkward, powerful, human.
Nude Bathing (2025)
Paint marker on 30 cm glass disc
In Nude Bathing, Armstrong riffs on the long art-historical lineage of bathers—from Gauguin to Degas—only to flip the tradition into something mischievous, contemporary, and unmistakably Daubist. Two figures, lifted and reimagined from classical nudes, stand in a hyper-saturated, almost cartoon-bright landscape that refuses any pretence of illusion.
The glass disc format flattens the scene into a glowing, iconic emblem, while the thick, gestural line work gives the figures a raw, immediate presence. Although the imagery nods to art history, the tone is entirely Armstrong’s: playful, ambiguous, gently irreverent. The original “pastoral nude” becomes a site of interruption—humour and critique wrapped together in a single, bold silhouette.
A compact, radiant work that continues Armstrong’s ongoing project of reclaiming and remixing the canon in his own idiom.
Amelia (2025)
Paint marker on 30cm glass disc — image stolen from the children’s art page of the local Sunday paper
“Amelia” continues Driller’s long Daubist tradition of lifting imagery from the most unlikely of sources and granting it new agency. A child’s drawing — exuberant, wonky, and utterly unselfconscious — is transplanted onto a luminous glass disc, where it becomes both a celebration of unfiltered creativity and a gentle critique of how images circulate, are consumed, and are constantly recontextualised.
The work plays with authorship in the purest Daubist sense: the innocence of the original drawing collides with Driller’s knowing act of appropriation, creating a humorous yet pointed commentary on originality, value, and the porous boundary between “high” and “low” art.
A reminder that all images, no matter how humble their beginnings, can be transformed with a single act of mischievous intent.
The Bachelor and Spinsters Ball (2014) P.O.A.
Edvard Munch figures painted on original landscape painting
In The Bachelor and Spinsters Ball, Driller Jet Armstrong transplants a cast of spectral Edvard Munch figures into the brittle calm of an Australian rural landscape, collapsing two cultural worlds—Expressionist anxiety and outback stoicism—into a single, uneasy tableau. Originally painted as a benign bush scene, the landscape becomes a stage for emotional dissonance as these elongated, haunted visitors drift through the dust like misplaced guests at a country dance.
By hand-painting Munch’s figures directly over the found painting, Armstrong rewires the colonial pastoral imaginary, exposing the loneliness, yearning, and quiet hysteria often sanitised out of Australia’s homestead nostalgia. The work is both satire and séance: a Daubist collision where art history’s ghosts mingle with the rituals of rural social life, and where the borrowed gesture becomes a form of cultural truth-telling.
The result is a ball no one asked to attend—yet everyone somehow recognises.
Stop Weeping Woman (2023) P.O.A.
Acrylic on original Australian landscape painting
In this charged re-visioning of Picasso’s iconic Weeping Woman, Armstrong transplants the fractured, anguished figure into the suburban-bush vernacular of an Australian landscape painting. Her bruised, blackened eyes are no longer Cubist affectations—they become a direct indictment of Australia’s male-violence epidemic, a crisis too often rendered invisible behind closed doors.
The daubed-in screen door—half barrier, half cage—functions as both symbol and architecture: the flimsy threshold between domesticity and danger, between public denial and private terror. By interrupting the tranquillity of the inherited landscape with Picasso’s anguished muse, Armstrong forces the viewer to confront the violence embedded within the myth of the “peaceful Australian home.”
A work that refuses to look away—and refuses to let us look away.
w Year’s Eve Dinner Party (2019) P.O.A.
Oil paint and hand-daubed COVID motifs on an original salon painting
Created in the first weeks of Australia’s pandemic lockdown, New Year’s Eve Dinner Party captures the eerie dissonance between the opulence of the pre-COVID world and the invisible catastrophe already circulating through it. Driller retrofits a 19th-century aristocratic banquet—powdered wigs, crystal glasses, ornamental drapery—with the unmistakable red corona of the virus itself, replacing every face with the molecular emblem that would soon come to define an era.
What was once a scene of indulgence and social certainty becomes a prophetic tableau: privilege toasting its own continuity on the eve of global rupture. Driller’s intervention turns the painting into an accidental time capsule—an image of people celebrating in blissful ignorance while the pandemic stands already among them, multiplying.
Painted during lockdown, the work is both documentary and satire, a portrait of denial, contagion, and the moment history quietly shifted beneath everyone’s feet.
Welcome to Country (2019) P,O.A.
Paint on original landscape painting
In Welcome to Country, Armstrong overlays a calm river landscape with a bold, geometric form edged in dotted linework—a direct and reverent nod to one of his most influential favourite First Nations artists, Rover Thomas. By imposing this powerful visual language onto a colonial landscape painting, Armstrong stages a deliberate cultural collision: Rover Thomas’s Country pushed assertively over the top of a sentimental settler fantasy.
The intervention functions as both homage and critique. It honours Thomas’s unmistakable spatial abstraction while exposing the artificial emptiness of traditional landscape paintings that omit the presence, culture and sovereignty of the First Peoples. In Armstrong’s hands, the original painting becomes background—quiet, decorative, and complicit—while the Rover Thomas–inspired form dominates, reclaiming space and narrative.